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Reposted Questions from the Canadian Inquisition (RQFTCI*)
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Mark Brader
Jun 7, 2020, 10:23:24 PM6/7/20
to
On 2020-03-14, I wrote:
| MI5 have decided it's safest to postpone the rest of the Spring 2020
| season, so QFTCIMI520 Current Events will not be appearing again in
| two weeks. Presumably it will resume when the Inquisition does.
Two days later Toronto Public Health decided we were right, and
demanded the closure of all restaurants, pubs, bars, clubs, etc.
(except for take-out service) effective the next day -- which was
St. Patrick's Day, when they would have been particularly busy.
So if we had gone ahead with Game 9 of the January-April season,
Game 10 would still have been canceled or postponed.
All of our league venues are still closed, and even if they are
soon allowed to reopen with customers required to space themselves
out, it's still not obvious whether the league will attempt to
resume play under such conditions. So there's no guessing when
the current season will resume.
| As for non-current-events rounds, I have 27 more sets of QFTCIMI520
| questions from Games 2-8 ready to use, which at the current rate of
| posting should last us here until the end of May.
Considering how little traffic rec.games.trivia has these days,
I'm not going to stop posting QFTCI just because there are no
new questions. It's been 12 years since I started doing this,
and I'm simply going to start over, reusing the same questions
(sometimes with additional edits) that I posted previously.
If you can remember the answers after that amount of time, when
bully for you!
When reposting games I'll put R on the beginning of the previous
posting tag and an indication of the original year on the end if
it was not there already, e.g. RQFTCI06.
Of course it's also possible that for some questions the answers
have changed. My general rule in that case will be to accept
*either* the answer that was correct when the game was originally
played, *or* the current correct answer. If the answer has changed,
then you'll need to be aware that some subsidiary information
provided as hints within the original question may be out of date.
For example, if the original game date was 2006 and the question
was "What European city was the home of the most recent summer
Olympics?", then you could give the 2006 answer of Athens (2004)
or the 2020 answer of Rio de Janeiro (2016), even though Rio is
not a European city".
In general with questions like this I'll try to call attention
to words that might be out of date, by marking them with triple
quotation marks. So the actual form of that question when reposted
would be something like: "What European city was the home of the
"""most recent""" summer Olympics?" And the peculiar punctuation
is your hint that the facts might have changed.
I said *might* be out of date, and *might* have changed, because
if you see that punctuation it doesn't mean that the answer *has*
changed. It might be that nothing has changed, or it might be
that a person referred to in the present tense has died, but the
answer is still the same; or anything like that. For example, if
the question was "Who """has""" had the most years in office as US
president?", Franklin Roosevelt would be the only possible answer.
When I post the answer in a case like that, I'll give the answer
and put something like "(still true)" or "(died in 2010)" after it.
For some questions I will use a different rule, such as requiring
the original answer, or requiring you to say which year you are
answering for, and in those cases I will include an explicit note.
Now, the first game I'm going to repost will be one that did not
have the usual rules. On 2008-02-04, I posted this introduction
to the league and to QFTCI:
| The Canadian Inquisition is a team trivia league that plays in Toronto
| pubs. It's a cooperative league, whose teams take turns to write and
| ask the questions that the others answer. My team is the Usual Suspects,
| and a couple of years ago we put together a special non-team game that
| contained 101 questions. With the concurrence of our team captain,
| Rodney Boyd, I'm going to post those questions here in 5 sets over the
| next while.
|
| Since people seem to like posting answers in the newsgroup these days,
| I'll go along with that style. I won't respond to each individual
| posting of answers the way Robert Jen does for his quizzes, though.
| (Well, I may do so if I see a partial answer posted, to ask for more.)
(Posting followups to ask entrants to clarify proved impractical,
so I soon substituted the method of anticipating partial answers
and posting a likely "more specific" question in rot13.)
| Naturally, I expect people to answer based on their own knowledge and
| nothing else.
|
| When these questions were originally used, they were asked on a
| time-limited basis but several players were allowed to guess in
| succession on the same question until someone got it right, even
| including multiple guesses by the same player.
For your interest, the scoring rules in the original game (there
were also timing rules, but never mind that) were as follows:
Each question was first posed to a specific player, and if
they didn't get it, it went to the other players in turn until
somebody did. (The players were called on in a specific order
defined by a stack of cards in the hands of the scorekeeper --
me -- and changed during the game).
The scoring was 3 points if the first player got it, 2 if
someone else did, and -1 for a wrong answer -- to avoid the
penalty each player had the right to pass.
If nobody got it, it went around a second time, this time for
1 point and no penalty for wrong answers.
The right to be asked the question first was advanced from
one player to the next on each new question, but in order
of seating.
| What I'll do to maintain the spirit of that rule is to say that
| when you post your answers, you may give up to 3 guesses on
| any question. That means 3 guesses in the same answer-posting,
| not successive tries. And there'll be a penalty for guessing
| more times than you need to.
|
| Specifically, the scoring on each question will be:
| * 6 points for a right answer on the first guess
| * 3 points for a right answer on the second guess
| * 1 point for a right answer on the third guess
| * -1 point for each additional guess after the
| correct answer.
And this scoring is what I'll be using again this time around.
| So if the question is "What is the capital of Canada", the answer
| "Ottawa" scores 6; "Montreal or Ottawa" scores 3; "Montreal,
| Ottawa, or Toronto" scores 3-1 = 2; and "Five" is right out.
|
| If I ask for a person, just give their surname unless I say
| otherwise. If you give unnecessary detail such as a first name,
| you have to be right.
|
| I'll reveal the answers and tabulate scores about 3 days after
| each posting, and then continue with the next set of questions.
| I'll keep cumulative scores through the whole set of 101
| questions.
}
| Have fun.
}
| After the 5 sets of questions from this old game, I will probably
| post other question sets that the Suspects wrote for past regular
| Canadian Inquisition games. If I do, the scoring will be different.
And I similarly expect to do that again.
So, once again: Have fun.
--
Mark Brader | "...it doesn't even fulfill the most basic
Toronto | requirements for a good text editor, such as
m...@vex.net | having a built-in mail reader." -- Per Abrahamsen
My text in this article is in the public domain.
| MI5 have decided it's safest to postpone the rest of the Spring 2020
| season, so QFTCIMI520 Current Events will not be appearing again in
| two weeks. Presumably it will resume when the Inquisition does.
Two days later Toronto Public Health decided we were right, and
demanded the closure of all restaurants, pubs, bars, clubs, etc.
(except for take-out service) effective the next day -- which was
St. Patrick's Day, when they would have been particularly busy.
So if we had gone ahead with Game 9 of the January-April season,
Game 10 would still have been canceled or postponed.
All of our league venues are still closed, and even if they are
soon allowed to reopen with customers required to space themselves
out, it's still not obvious whether the league will attempt to
resume play under such conditions. So there's no guessing when
the current season will resume.
| As for non-current-events rounds, I have 27 more sets of QFTCIMI520
| questions from Games 2-8 ready to use, which at the current rate of
| posting should last us here until the end of May.
Considering how little traffic rec.games.trivia has these days,
I'm not going to stop posting QFTCI just because there are no
new questions. It's been 12 years since I started doing this,
and I'm simply going to start over, reusing the same questions
(sometimes with additional edits) that I posted previously.
If you can remember the answers after that amount of time, when
bully for you!
When reposting games I'll put R on the beginning of the previous
posting tag and an indication of the original year on the end if
it was not there already, e.g. RQFTCI06.
Of course it's also possible that for some questions the answers
have changed. My general rule in that case will be to accept
*either* the answer that was correct when the game was originally
played, *or* the current correct answer. If the answer has changed,
then you'll need to be aware that some subsidiary information
provided as hints within the original question may be out of date.
For example, if the original game date was 2006 and the question
was "What European city was the home of the most recent summer
Olympics?", then you could give the 2006 answer of Athens (2004)
or the 2020 answer of Rio de Janeiro (2016), even though Rio is
not a European city".
In general with questions like this I'll try to call attention
to words that might be out of date, by marking them with triple
quotation marks. So the actual form of that question when reposted
would be something like: "What European city was the home of the
"""most recent""" summer Olympics?" And the peculiar punctuation
is your hint that the facts might have changed.
I said *might* be out of date, and *might* have changed, because
if you see that punctuation it doesn't mean that the answer *has*
changed. It might be that nothing has changed, or it might be
that a person referred to in the present tense has died, but the
answer is still the same; or anything like that. For example, if
the question was "Who """has""" had the most years in office as US
president?", Franklin Roosevelt would be the only possible answer.
When I post the answer in a case like that, I'll give the answer
and put something like "(still true)" or "(died in 2010)" after it.
For some questions I will use a different rule, such as requiring
the original answer, or requiring you to say which year you are
answering for, and in those cases I will include an explicit note.
Now, the first game I'm going to repost will be one that did not
have the usual rules. On 2008-02-04, I posted this introduction
to the league and to QFTCI:
| The Canadian Inquisition is a team trivia league that plays in Toronto
| pubs. It's a cooperative league, whose teams take turns to write and
| ask the questions that the others answer. My team is the Usual Suspects,
| and a couple of years ago we put together a special non-team game that
| contained 101 questions. With the concurrence of our team captain,
| Rodney Boyd, I'm going to post those questions here in 5 sets over the
| next while.
|
| Since people seem to like posting answers in the newsgroup these days,
| I'll go along with that style. I won't respond to each individual
| posting of answers the way Robert Jen does for his quizzes, though.
| (Well, I may do so if I see a partial answer posted, to ask for more.)
(Posting followups to ask entrants to clarify proved impractical,
so I soon substituted the method of anticipating partial answers
and posting a likely "more specific" question in rot13.)
| Naturally, I expect people to answer based on their own knowledge and
| nothing else.
|
| When these questions were originally used, they were asked on a
| time-limited basis but several players were allowed to guess in
| succession on the same question until someone got it right, even
| including multiple guesses by the same player.
For your interest, the scoring rules in the original game (there
were also timing rules, but never mind that) were as follows:
Each question was first posed to a specific player, and if
they didn't get it, it went to the other players in turn until
somebody did. (The players were called on in a specific order
defined by a stack of cards in the hands of the scorekeeper --
me -- and changed during the game).
The scoring was 3 points if the first player got it, 2 if
someone else did, and -1 for a wrong answer -- to avoid the
penalty each player had the right to pass.
If nobody got it, it went around a second time, this time for
1 point and no penalty for wrong answers.
The right to be asked the question first was advanced from
one player to the next on each new question, but in order
of seating.
| What I'll do to maintain the spirit of that rule is to say that
| when you post your answers, you may give up to 3 guesses on
| any question. That means 3 guesses in the same answer-posting,
| not successive tries. And there'll be a penalty for guessing
| more times than you need to.
|
| Specifically, the scoring on each question will be:
| * 6 points for a right answer on the first guess
| * 3 points for a right answer on the second guess
| * 1 point for a right answer on the third guess
| * -1 point for each additional guess after the
| correct answer.
And this scoring is what I'll be using again this time around.
| So if the question is "What is the capital of Canada", the answer
| "Ottawa" scores 6; "Montreal or Ottawa" scores 3; "Montreal,
| Ottawa, or Toronto" scores 3-1 = 2; and "Five" is right out.
|
| If I ask for a person, just give their surname unless I say
| otherwise. If you give unnecessary detail such as a first name,
| you have to be right.
|
| I'll reveal the answers and tabulate scores about 3 days after
| each posting, and then continue with the next set of questions.
| I'll keep cumulative scores through the whole set of 101
| questions.
}
| Have fun.
}
| After the 5 sets of questions from this old game, I will probably
| post other question sets that the Suspects wrote for past regular
| Canadian Inquisition games. If I do, the scoring will be different.
And I similarly expect to do that again.
So, once again: Have fun.
--
Mark Brader | "...it doesn't even fulfill the most basic
Toronto | requirements for a good text editor, such as
m...@vex.net | having a built-in mail reader." -- Per Abrahamsen
My text in this article is in the public domain.
Erland Sommarskog
Jun 8, 2020, 1:28:56 PM6/8/20
to
Mark Brader (m...@vex.net) writes:
> Two days later Toronto Public Health decided we were right, and
> demanded the closure of all restaurants, pubs, bars, clubs, etc.
> (except for take-out service) effective the next day -- which was
> St. Patrick's Day, when they would have been particularly busy.
> So if we had gone ahead with Game 9 of the January-April season,
> Game 10 would still have been canceled or postponed.
>
> All of our league venues are still closed, and even if they are
> soon allowed to reopen with customers required to space themselves
> out, it's still not obvious whether the league will attempt to
> resume play under such conditions. So there's no guessing when
> the current season will resume.
What? You haven't gone virtual like anyone else?
> Two days later Toronto Public Health decided we were right, and
> demanded the closure of all restaurants, pubs, bars, clubs, etc.
> (except for take-out service) effective the next day -- which was
> St. Patrick's Day, when they would have been particularly busy.
> So if we had gone ahead with Game 9 of the January-April season,
> Game 10 would still have been canceled or postponed.
>
> All of our league venues are still closed, and even if they are
> soon allowed to reopen with customers required to space themselves
> out, it's still not obvious whether the league will attempt to
> resume play under such conditions. So there's no guessing when
> the current season will resume.
Thanks for keeping the questions going here in r.g.t at least. There
are all chances of embarrassments to answer a question wrong this time,
what I had right the first time (and it was not just a blind guess).
Mark Brader
Jun 8, 2020, 3:22:31 PM6/8/20
to
Erland Sommarskog:
> Thanks for keeping the questions going here in r.g.t at least. There
> are all chances of embarrassments to answer a question wrong this time,
> what I had right the first time (and it was not just a blind guess).
That's the spirit!
--
Mark Brader | "Canadians do not exclaim. The exclamation point is
Toronto | removed from our word-processing programs at the border
m...@vex.net | and sold back to the Americans for scrap." --Matthew Hart
> What? You haven't gone virtual like anyone else?
Pfffffft.
> Thanks for keeping the questions going here in r.g.t at least. There
> are all chances of embarrassments to answer a question wrong this time,
> what I had right the first time (and it was not just a blind guess).
--
Mark Brader | "Canadians do not exclaim. The exclamation point is
Toronto | removed from our word-processing programs at the border
m...@vex.net | and sold back to the Americans for scrap." --Matthew Hart
Mark Brader
Jun 23, 2020, 1:38:41 AM6/23/20
to
2020-06-07, I wrote:
> Considering how little traffic rec.games.trivia has these days,
> I'm not going to stop posting QFTCI just because there are no
> new questions. It's been 12 years since I started doing this,
> and I'm simply going to start over, reusing the same questions
> (sometimes with additional edits) that I posted previously.
> If you can remember the answers after that amount of time, when
> bully for you!
The first seasons that I posted in 2008 were ones that were written
> Considering how little traffic rec.games.trivia has these days,
> I'm not going to stop posting QFTCI just because there are no
> new questions. It's been 12 years since I started doing this,
> and I'm simply going to start over, reusing the same questions
> (sometimes with additional edits) that I posted previously.
> If you can remember the answers after that amount of time, when
> bully for you!
by the Usual Suspects, and I'm going to continue with those now in
the same order that I originally posted them. This means that I'll
start with the January-April 2007 season of 10 games and a Final.
If the Canadian Inquisition resumes before I finish with season,
then I'll return to posting new material from our recent games.
* Out-of-Date Questions
(This section is repeated from the 2020-06-07 posting)
(This section, however, is repeated from my regular QFTCI introductory
posting.)
The usual rule in our regular league games is that each question
goes to an individual who can answer for 2 points without
assistance, and if he misses, he can consult his team and try
again for 1 point. If the quizmaster judges that an answer is
incomplete, she can ask for more details before ruling the answer
right or wrong.
To maintain the spirit of these rules, I will say that you can
give two answers on every question. But I will penalize you if
you give both a right answer and a wrong answer. My scoring is:
4 points - if you answer once and are right (or twice, both right)
3 points - if you guess twice and are right only the first time
2 points - if you guess twice and are right only the second time
Bonus points may occasionally be available and will be explained in
the relevant round.
If you give only one answer, but with only some sort of additional
comment, please make it clear that that's what you're doing.
If there is any doubt I'll assume that you are giving two answers.
If I see more than two answers, the third and any later ones will
be ignored.
Although there is no rule like this in the Canadian Inquisition,
where it makes sense I will accept answers that I think are almost
close enough (*more than half right*), with a 1-point penalty.
But I will reject answers that I do not think are sufficiently
specific, since there is no opportunity to ask for clarification
when answers are posted in the newsgroup. If I anticipate the
possibility of insufficiently specific answers I will try to
provide guidance in a way that does not spoil the questions,
such as a note in rot13 to be read after you have answered.
You must, of course, answer based on your own knowledge and
nothing else. You must post all your answers in a single posting
(Except in case of technical difficulties, when emailed answers
or multiple postings will be accepted.)
Where a person's name is asked for, *normally you need only give
the surname*. If you do give another part of the name and you're
wrong, your answer is wrong.
--
Mark Brader, Toronto | "It's easier to deal with 'opposite numbers'
m...@vex.net | when you know you cannot trust them." --Chess
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